Gold, gold, gold. Keep 'em coming!

Well it just goes to show that you can be proud to be British, whilst still not liking that many things about the UK.

I’m talking, of course, about the wonderful collection of medals accumulated by Team GB this weekend. From tennis to various track and field events to those in wetter environments, we have done ourselves proud and even I found myself shouting encouragement at the TV despite not really being a sports fan. It’s so nice to see enthralling sport on the telly that isn’t football!

Even Andy Murray came up trumps and paraded round Centre Court wearing a Union Jack (I wouldn’t have put it past him to drape himself in the Saltire). Wimbledon lost its stuffiness and was a better place for it, and the Olympic stadium went wild with emotion; how Jessica Ennis kept calm in the face of such frenzied support I will never know. You could sense the atmosphere even through the TV screen and it must have been awe inspiring to be there during that hour when we bagged long jump, women’s heptathlon and 10,000 metre golds.

So it makes you proud to be British. I might even get out my own union flag and drape it across the front of my house and I am looking with greedy eyes at a very nice union Jack T-shirt in the local posh dress shop.

The French, of course, are carping and throwing around sour grapes like they’re going out of fashion, after having been shown up following their gloating last week when Francois Hollande stated that “wasn’t it good of us to put on a great show just to allow his French athletes to win medals”. Well who’s third in the medal table now then, garlic munchers? Oh, that would be good old GB! And if you pro rata the number of medals we’ve won against our population, and compare it to the same pro rata’d figure for the US and China who are above us in the table and have a vastly larger populace, I bet we’d come out top.

All this patriotic flag waving doesn’t mean, however, that I particularly like Great Britain or want to live here. Yes, there are lots of good things about the UK but there’s a hell of a lot wrong with it too, and no amount of sporting triumph can take them away. Where should I start – Ed Miliband seems a good place, although Jessie J, work shy and unworthy dole scroungers (yes, controversial statement I know, but there are some out there) , Eastenders and John Terry are also good starting points for a list of ‘Things That Are Bad About Britain’. And it could go on for ever, this list, but then that would be boring and we’d all have a different opinion.

Of course wherever you live in the world has it’s faults and I have no illusion that where I want to go is paradise (well, we all know it isn’t because I want to go to Crete, and the Greeks are further up shit creek than we are and they’ve lost their paddle to boot!). But you have to find the place where your soul feels at home, and for me that simply isn’t the UK.

But for now, let’s bask in the reflected glory of not only our superb athletes but what is, so far, an impeccably organised games as far as the sport and facilities go (we’ll not talk about Locog or the ticketing fiasco, or the greedy unions who from my experience last week are doing no more work than normal for their extortionate Olympic bonuses and in fact for much of the time are probably carrying less people than usual as lots of Londoners are working at home). Seb Coe and his team should be congratulated and I hope that the media, who led the carping club beforehand, have the grace to eat their words and say how well we’ve done.

As to legacy, well who knows? We now have some brand new, wonderful facilities and perhaps private sector companies will step in and make sure they continue to be maintained and run efficiently because God knows there isn’t the money in the public sector.

Rule Brittania!